Mini Smiles · a five-minute habit
Six steps, none of them precious. The whole point of a five-minute book is that you can finish a page before the tea goes cold.
The method
Move your cursor across the cards — the one under the pointer lifts out of the fan and turns over to show the step.
Flip through and stop where your eye stops. There is no right order — the booklet is bound so any page can be the first one.
Pencils blend softly and forgive mistakes. Markers give flat, confident colour. Gel pens sit on top of both. Pick one to lead and one to accent.
Test every colour on the inside back cover first. Paper changes how a pigment reads, and two greens that looked different in the tin often do not.
Lay your lightest tone across the biggest shapes, then work down to the darkest. Going light first means you can still change your mind.
Go over the edges of each shape a second time with the same colour. One hue at two strengths reads as shadow — no extra pencils needed.
A white gel pen for highlights, a fine liner to tidy the outline. Then tear along the perforation, or leave it bound and start the next one.
No booklet to hand?
What you need
The forgiving option. Layer them, blend them, lift them with a putty rubber.
Flat, saturated colour in one pass. Put a scrap sheet behind the page — they bleed.
White for highlights, metallics for the mandala borders. They sit on top of everything.
For tidying an outline you have coloured over. 0.3mm is plenty.
Haven’t got any of it yet?
Paint with no supplies at all
Feel the Art
